Video: Creating a pattern fill

All right gang! Here we are in the last exercise of Chapter 6 and we are looking at an almost complete version of the Tonalpohualli, 260-day Aztec calendar, which is why I have gone ahead and called this version of the document The end times.ai, found inside the 06_fill_stroke folder, because these are the end times of Chapter 6. I don't mean anything larger than that. Here is the thing. If you are still working along me inside of that Richer artwork.ai file, good for you. That is awesome news. Now we are going to do two things inside of this exercise. We are going to fix the plain blacks, turn them into rich blacks. I'm also going to show you how to hide your selection edges and what that means and how it can come back and bite you and then we are going to create a repeating fill pattern based on this nose, which sounds like a completely goofy preposition but it's actually going to look really great.

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Creating a pattern fill

All right gang! Here we are in the last exercise of Chapter 6 and we arelooking at an almost complete version of the Tonalpohualli, 260-day Azteccalendar, which is why I have gone ahead and called this version of thedocument The end times.ai, found inside the 06_fill_stroke folder, becausethese are the end times of Chapter 6. I don't mean anything larger than that.Here is the thing. If you are still working along me inside of that Richerartwork.ai file, good for you. That is awesome news. Now we are going to do twothings inside of this exercise. We are going to fix the plain blacks, turn theminto rich blacks. I'm also going to show you how to hide your selection edgesand what that means and how it can come back and bite you and then we are goingto create a repeating fill pattern based on this nose, which sounds like acompletely goofy preposition but it's actually going to look really great.

So for starters, go ahead and click on one of these objects, any one theseobjects inside of this group that makes up the majority of the face. And I wantyou to go up to the View menu, just because all of these selection edges arereally getting in the way of seeing what's going on. Go up to the View menu andchoose Hide Edges or you would press Ctrl+H, Command+H on the Mac, and noticethat the edges go away. Now, these items are still selected; if I were to movethem, they would move to a new location. We are not just seeing all the anchorpoints and segments anymore. So I'll go ahead and undo, Ctrl+Z, Command+Z on the Mac.

So I need to make sure my Strokes are active, which they are and then I wouldswitch the strokes to Rich Black by clicking on Rich Black here inside of theSwatches palette and they are all better. So I'm going to zoom in one moreclick actually. This was before and this is after. So it's a pretty subtledifferent but it's going to be meaningful in print and as I say we will have noproblems now with any gaps. We have trapped our gaps successfully. So that'salways a good thing.All right, now I'm going to zoom out to take in more of my illustration at atime and I'm going to click on the nose and notice now that we can't see any ofthe selection fold I've associated with that nose. We are not seeing the anchorpoints, we are not seeing the segments and that's because hiding the edges is asticky state. Meaning that the edges remain hidden from one operation toanother inside of this illustration and by the way, you wouldn't be able to seehighlighted text either, which can really throw you. So just remember, if youclick on something and you don't see the segments and you don't see the pointsand you are thinking that the program is broken, it's just really a function ofthe fact that you need to go up to the View menu. You can choose Show Edges orof course, just get in the habit of pressing Ctrl+H, Command+H on the Mac andnow we can see those edges.

All right, I'm going to go ahead and drag that selected nose and drop it intothe Swatches palette and that turns the nose into a repeating pattern. Allright, I'm going to go ahead and name that repeating pattern. Let's actuallymake our swatches even bigger here, I'm going to switch over to the LargeThumbnail View and then I'll double click on New Pattern Swatch 1 and I'll callit God's nose or something along those lines and then click OK in order toaccept that new pattern.Now I have messed up my selected nose here because I just went ahead andassigned this nose pattern to the stroke and so I need to switch this strokeback to Rich Black; I didn't mean to do that at all. That was a mistake. Allright, now let's go ahead and apply that nose pattern to the biggest circle inthis calendar here and I'm just trying to center the illustration on screenhere. I'm going to click on this shape right there so this outermost circlethat is filled with the medium clay. In order to see how it's filled withmedium clay, I'll press the X key in order to make my fill active and there ismedium clay right there in the Swatches palette.

Okay now, drop down to the Appearance palette. Make sure that you are seeingyour Appearance palette on screen and if you don't, of course, you'd go to theWindow menu and choose Appearance right there. All right, I'm going to click onFill and then I'm going to click on this little Page icon down here at thebottom of the palette, which will duplicate that selected attribute and we nowhave two fills. Now that may seem like a really strange think to do, especiallysince we have one solid fill, just covering up another solid fill, what's thepoint of doing that.Well, there is no point if that's all we do, but there is a point if we nowapply God's nose and the thing about this God's nose pattern is that it has anopaque white fill inside the nose and no fill on the outside so it'stransparent outside the nose and that means we are going to allow the mediumclay to show through. So I'll go ahead and click on it and sure enough, we havea combination of this nose fill and this medium clay fill here inside of thelarger circle.

I am going to go ahead and click off the shape in order to de-select it and wehave now completed the calendar. We have a very nice one, I think. Muted, thecolors are a little muted but that's because this is a terracotta calendar thatwe have managed to create and we are only in chapter 06, it just gets betterand better throughout the series as we learn together how to absolutely masterIllustrator CS4.

Q: Adobe Bridge CS4 is not previewing files in the same way for me as it is in the tutorial. All I am seeing is a low-quality thumbnail of the image, not previews of each artboard. Why is there a difference between the tutorial and what I am seeing?

A: There is a different view in the tutorial because the author used a beta version of Bridge during the recording. The final release of Bridge CS4 displays thumbnails as you describe.

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